Six of One (10 page)

Chapter Eighteen

Memory Lane and a Sleepy Swain Revisited

It was never quiet in that place for long. No sooner had Arabella sailed out of the room than two more women, middle-aged ones this time, sailed in. I had no doubt that they were the aunties promised to me earlier by the young Jane Grey.

The sailboat mentions are intentional. The second-generation queens, Mary, Elizabeth, and Jane Grey, had a nervous energy about them, like ships tugging at their moorings in harbor. They were like new ships: polished and well-appointed, wind in the sails, fire in the bellies, full of the promise of magnificent performance
,
and
yar!
as a pirate might say. The two women that were with me now were
not
“yar.” They looked more like a couple of armada galleons limping back into Cadiz harbor after a losing battle. Sails tattered, shiny surfaces tarnished by salty air, listing a bit from some damage to the hull, and stripped of whatever they carried in the way of treasure, they were magnificent in defeat, but defeated nevertheless. I would have bet my panties that they were Mary’s aunties—if I had been wearing any.

“You are young Mary’s aunts, aren’t you?” I asked.

“We are,” they replied in unison.

Well, the young Mary I had spoken to would have had several aunts on her mother’s side, including the fabulously mad Juana la Loca. Juana was so besotted with her handsome husband, Philip the Fair, that she kept his decomposing body around long after his death for the questionable solace of embracing it in the wee hours.
God
, I thought,
I hope that Juana is not here. If she is, please don’t let her be on the roster of women I will be meeting tonight
. Then I remembered that this place was “ladies only”; even if Juana was hanging around here somewhere, presumably the putrid and decaying Philip was
not
.

Neither of the aunties present looked mad—or, for that matter, Spanish. They were clearly Tudors, one being tall and fair like the young Elizabeth and her cousin Jane Grey, and the other shorter and plump, resembling Arabella.

“I am happy to meet the sisters of Henry VIII, Margaret and Mary, the first princesses of the Tudor line,” I said, hazarding a guess.

The shorter of the two women spoke. “We started out as princesses, but we wound up queens, and don’t you forget it, Dolly! I am Margaret, the Scottish queen. With me is my sister Mary, the French queen. You will address us by our first names, as you were previously instructed to do.”

Mary, the French queen, looked very, very wistful just then. Margaret, the Scottish queen, was bridling visibly. She took a deep breath and cast me a withering glance; I realized that unless I was very much mistaken, I was about to be taken to task, and I tried to deflect it with my usual apology.

“I just can’t seem to get the etiquette here straight. Please don’t take my head off!”

The words were no sooner out of my mouth than the rush to the wooden bedpost was on. With two of them knocking, the din was considerable. I had done it again. I started wondering if I would ever stop blundering.

“For one who is supposed to be so clever, you choose your words most unfeelingly, Dolly!”

I got nettled, like I always do when a protagonist hits me where I live—in my brain.

“If that bedpost could talk, ‘unfeeling’ might be the word it used to describe the pummeling it is receiving from the two of you!” I said. “And another thing: whatever you do, never insinuate to a professor that she isn’t as clever as you are!”

“Really, Dolly,” Margaret replied, “I find the idea of a world in which the bedposts could talk to be quite unspeakable!” I had clearly riled up Margaret. I was going to ask her if her pun about the bedposts was intentional, just to remove any lingering doubts about my cleverness, but I did not want to set her off again. As it turned out, setting Margaret off was one of Mary’s favorite pastimes. I realized again that little sisters had not changed much over the centuries from the way that Mary artlessly tossed about loaded questions.

“Why the preference for mute bedposts, Margaret?” she asked.

Judging from the way that Margaret took the bait, big sisters still hadn’t changed much, either. “Surely the sway that wooden heads and wooden hearts have had in the boudoirs of our family has caused havoc enough, without the bedposts giving tongue!” she said.

Mary was quick to reply. “Wooden heads and giving tongue! Suitable topics of conversation for the eve of a wedding, n’est-ce pas? I remember how impatient I was for my honeymoon—well, for the second one, anyway. True love gives a fillip to lovemaking that nothing else does! The pairing of true hearts is God’s will, and it sufficeth.”

Mary Tudor, known as Mary Rose, ought to know. She was Europe’s loveliest young princess when she learned that she was to be sacrificed in marriage to the icky and elderly King Louis XII of France. She was not happy about this. Just before the wedding, she deluged her big brother Henry VIII with a tearful tirade of epic proportions. It turned out that the one soft spot in Henry’s heart belonged to this little sister, and her tears undid him. In his perplexity, Henry promised her that as a reward for marrying icky old Louis XII, her second husband could be entirely of her own choosing.

Mary Rose proceeded, as Louis XII’s bride and Queen of France, to wear the poor old man out so badly in the boudoir that he died from his exertions within weeks. With Henry’s promise safely in her pocket, Mary Rose immediately proposed marriage to the hot—but well beneath her dignity—Duke of Suffolk. The duke was hesitant, fearing treason charges, but Mary Rose, like the mythical Niobe, knew how to cry a river, and floated Suffolk down the aisle in obscenely short order.

Henry VIII knew a done deal when he saw one. He exacted a social and monetary comeuppance from the newlyweds that did not entirely exclude his baby sister from life at the English court, but which sidelined her to the countryside a good deal of the time. By all accounts, Mary lived in a somewhat seedy—but contented—estrogen stupor till the end of her days.

Margaret’s life was more of an estrogen furor. “Rose without a thorn” she may have been, but she had an unfortunate propensity to pricks. Not one but two disastrous marriages followed her royal widowhood as the dowager queen of Scotland. Her second and third husbands proceeded to divest her—in spite of some manful resistance on her part—of her political power, her children, her land, and her jewels, to the point that she famously had the cannon of Edinburgh Castle fired at husband number two.

In spite of her experiences, Margaret still managed to get all dreamy eyed at the mention of making love.

“My dear sister Mary, what
doesn’t
give a fillip to lovemaking?” she asked. “True love does, yes, but what about wealth, power, or danger…broad shoulders…the scent of lavender and roses…adultery and the forbidden…lacy nightdresses, moonlight, wine, the well-filled codpiece…a tender ballad…laughter and tears…innocence, youth, and beauty…it is all one, isn’t it, in the end?”

Mary was relentless. “Do you speak of your
own
youth and beauty, sister, or that of one’s man?”

“For the benefit of our guest, Mary, we should be speaking of the attractions of men,” Margaret replied testily, and then narrowed it down even further. “Really, we should speak of one man only; our brother Henry. Tell us, Dolly, what is it about your Harry that gives a fillip to
your
intimate moments? If, indeed, there
is
a fillip to your intimate moments.”

I can tell you, in retrospect, that those girls pulled no punches and took no prisoners. They had me thinking in spite of myself. I knew that once we were married, Harry’s wealth and lifestyle would bring me a cache by association that I, a humble college professor, could hardly achieve for myself. That in
itself
was exciting. On the visceral level, Harry could amply fill a codpiece, and I had no complaints to make about his technique. As far as danger being an augmentation to making love, Harry and I really could not compete with the cannon-firing variety that Margaret and her hubby had to their credit. I was prepared to argue, though, that stepping into Harry’s seventh marriage definitely qualified as hazardous duty.

I assured Mary and Margaret as to the quality of my intimate moments with Harry.

“Of course, Harry and I are both over forty, so youth and innocence—unlike my drunken butt on one or two occasions—have never been on the romantic table. All the rest of the things you mentioned…I suppose so. Except for the scent of lavender and roses, that is.”

“Don’t you appreciate the aroma of flowers, Dolly?” asked Mary.

I loved both lavender and roses and told Mary so. Harry was the one who didn’t care about them.

It was the strangest thing. As grandly sensual and epicurean as Harry could be, he really had no sense of smell to speak of. Perfumes on my person, the potpourri from the lingerie chest that scents my undies, candles or incense smoldering when we embraced—like pearls before swine, totally undiscerned by the nose of my betrothed.

“I had no idea that our brother had an olfactory deficit, did you, Margaret? None of his wives have ever mentioned it,” said Mary.

“Given the tumult surrounding our brother, Mary, I’m not surprised that a detail like that escaped mention. Or, for that matter, even
notice
.
You
noticed it though, Dolly.”

“Yes, Margaret, I did. Because of an experience I had in my youth.”

“Tell us about it.”

“It was my first year at the university, and Wally was my first love. It was an unrequited love, unfortunately. I was so shy that I didn’t know how to tell him how I felt. I learned one day that he was leaving the country at dawn the next morning to join the Peace Corps. I mustered up my courage and asked him to meet me in the campus’s Shakespeare Garden at midnight for a farewell toast under the full moon. It was such a still night; I remember thinking, ‘Come thou north wind, and blow thou south, that my garden spices may flow forth.’ I thought I was on pretty safe ground with a request right out of the Songs of Solomon, but I should have been wiser about what I wished for.”

“I know what that’s like!” said Margaret,
con simpatico
. “Tell us what happened next, Dolly.”

I told Margaret and Mary the whole, sad story. The aroma of the spring flowers that moonlit night was heady to me. Unfortunately, the combination of roses, lilies, lavender, Parma violets, lilac, and chamomile was downright soporific to my young swain. Between the flowers, the late hour, the moonlight, and the wine, it was all too much for him. He fell asleep among the flora just as I was working up the nerve to kiss him. I was so upset that I ran home crying. When I went back to the Shakespeare Garden at dawn to try to catch Wally before he left, he was already gone, but he had left a note behind. It said, “How embarrassing. Must fly.”

“I never heard from Wally again,” I told Margaret and Mary. “Talk about ill-met by moonlight!
All my hope was gone. Not to put too fine a point on it, all my hope was as dead as a doornail.”

“Your Wally was a man of few words, to be sure. Pardon our ignorance, Dolly, but what precisely is ‘the Peace Corps’?” asked Margaret.

“It is a benevolent organization that sends volunteers out to poor countries to help the indigent and the sick. Like the Knights Hospitaller during the Crusades,” I replied.

The image of Wally as a knight was a new one for me, and I have to admit that I liked it. I was surprised it had never come to mind sooner, amid all the other visions I had had of him over the years.

I imagined him tanned and sporting a loincloth in the tropical sun all the while I was in college. When I was a little older, I saw him in surgical scrubs and mask, performing miracles on the operating table in a grass-hut field hospital. When I was deciding whether or not to accept Harry’s proposal, I dreamt about Wally traveling from place to place in a jeep, wearing some very flattering safari gear and a big straw hat, earnestly conferring with the elders as he drove from village to village on some vital quest or other. Wally in armor, now—undoubtedly not a wise choice for wear in the tropics; but in the right climate, boy, would he have looked good in full metal and codpiece!

Mary smiled smugly. “You were a silly goose, Dolly, to let your knight crusade away from you without a fight, when it is so
very
easy to bend a man to your will,” she said, fingering the one piece of jewelry that she was wearing.

I had not paid much attention to the jewel before, but it was truly spectacular; the one spectacular item in an outfit that was otherwise less splendid than all the others I had seen here. Looking back, I really don’t see how I could have missed it, except for visions of Wally and his codpiece distracting me. It was a brooch, so big it looked more like a medal, with a pear-shaped pearl a couple of inches around suspended from the biggest diamond I had ever seen. I knew that that jewel had to be the legendary Mirror of Naples. Purportedly, it was spirited out of France by the newly widowed Mary to the consternation of her stepson, Francis I. Legend has it that Henry VIII was later seen sporting the jewel on his hat while jousting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, as a dig at the French. It was the last time that the jewel was seen or mentioned, as far as history was concerned, but Mary was about to break that silence.

“You are intrigued by my brooch, I see. Isn’t it beautiful, Dolly? Too beautiful to part with, and worth whatever it might take to possess. Unlike my sister Margaret, I let no man deprive
me
of anything that I really wanted to possess.”